Here it is, the first Release Candidate (RC) built for Kodi 15.0; freshly baked and ready to be served! Although we said that Kodi 15.0 is a “clean-up” edition, we still managed to squeeze in a couple of really nice features. So far we had around 1050 code change requests which were included ...

The MiniMAX is the world's smallest, most portable x-ray machine. Unlike its predecessors, which are a couple of feet wide and quite heavy, MiniMAX weighs five pounds. It can be whisked to accidents, crime scenes, battlefields, airports, sidelines, and any other place that could benefit from ...

Chemotherapy has odd origins - after observing war victims from World War I, researchers discovered that mustard gas applied to the skin of mice with an chemically-induced tumour resulted in a regression in the cutaneous tumour.

It is now one of the most successful treatments for cancer (despite its side effects). Cancer research UK recently said chemo was one of the main reasons that the 5-year survival rate had doubled over the last 40 years. Good news for cancer patients everywhere.

Yesterday I talked about how some of Kepler’s data can be a bit puzzling, but there are lots of results from Kepler that are very clear. After all, we now have more than a thousand confirmed exoplanets, many of which are from Kepler data. This means we have enough planets to run a bit of statistics, and it leads to some interesting results. For example, an article was published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) analyzing the statistical distribution of known exoplanets from the Kepler data. This article is open access (woot!) and you can read it here: http://goo.gl/TXos1u.

The focus of the paper was Earth-like worlds. The authors defined “Earth-like” as meeting three conditions:

First, the star the planet orbits must be Sun-like, meaning it must be a G or K type main sequence star. The Sun is a G-type star, and K-type stars are a bit smaller than our Sun. This criteria excludes M-type main sequence stars (red dwarfs) which are much more common, but not very Sun-like.

Second, the planet must have a diameter between 1 - 2 times that of Earth. Because Kepler discovers planets that pass in front of a star, it is easier to determine a planet’s size than its mass. But it is reasonable to assume that a planet about the same size as Earth will have a mass similar to Earth.

Third, the orbital period of the planet must be between 200 and 400 days. This is a rough way of saying the planet is in the “habitable zone” of its star. Very roughly, we can say the Sun’s habitable zone is bounded by the orbits of Venus and Mars. Venus has an orbital period of 225 days, and Mars 687 days. Since the K-class stars are a bit smaller and cooler than the Sun, the 200 - 400 day range is a reasonable measure of potentially habitable zone.

One of the challenges of doing statistics is making sure you account for biases in your data. In exoplanet data there are two potential biases. The first is that larger planets in closer orbits are easier to find than smaller planets in farther orbits. Another is that planets that could potentially be observed are missed because of noise in the data. We find the easy signals, but miss the hard ones.

To account for the first bias, the authors looked at data from 42,000 Sun-like stars, finding 603 planets. From this they were able to look at the distribution of planetary distances observed and extrapolated the data to larger distances. To account for the second bias the authors put fake planetary signals into the Kepler data and then tried to “discover” those signals in the data. From that they could get a handle on how many planets are “missed” in the real data. With a handle on those potential biases, the authors could calculate the fraction of Sun-like stars with Earth-like planets in their habitable zones.

The results are pretty surprising. Based on the statistics, it’s estimated that between 14% and 30% of G and K type stars have Earth-sized planets in their habitable zone. There are about 300 billion stars in our galaxy, and about 60 billion of them are G and K type stars. That means there is somewhere between 8 to 20 billion potentially habitable Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone.

It’s hard to wrap your head around those kind of numbers, so here is another way of looking at it. Suppose the Earth were a big blue marble. Suppose all the other potentially habitable “earths” were marbles of a similar size. If you put Earth and all the other marbles in a single container, there would be enough to fill a volume roughly the size of the great pyramid at Giza.

It is important to note that these are “potentially” habitable, meaning that they are at a distance where temperatures could allow for things like liquid water. That doesn’t mean they are habitable, or that they have life. Many could be dry planets like Venus, or have atmospheres that are too thin to support life. It is possible that most of them are warm and wet like Earth, or that none of them are. Right now we just don’t know.

But we do know the potential is there. The potential of billions of earths in our galaxy alone, and there are about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

So unprofessional. If you have an appointment at 8 don't bother to get there early, like with any other clinic. Why does your name have the word "hospital" in it? Definitely not acute care. You can be waiting on their door step to get in with an anxious dog and they'll turn their heads and make you wait out there. Reluctantly they let me in at 5 til. Thanks...
Once you get inside don't expect anything to get better. You'll wait on the chair while front desk ignores you and your dog, get taken back to a room to have a vet tech give up after 2 attempts of checking your dogs ears and say "well we just won't check your ears then..." Didn't attempt to give him treats or try soothing him down. No reinforcements or therapeutic behavior.
Maybe it's just a bad Monday morning crew, but I wouldn't take any chances. Will not be going back.
Your dog deserves better.

• • •

So unprofessional. If you have an appointment at 8 don't bother to get there early, like with any other clinic. Why does your name have the word "hospital" in it? Definitely not acute care. You can be waiting on their door step to get in with an anxious dog and they'll turn their heads and make you wait out there. Reluctantly they let me in at 5 til. Thanks...
Once you get inside don't expect anything to get better. You'll wait on the chair while front desk ignores you and your dog, get taken back to a room to have a vet tech give up after 2 attempts of checking your dogs ears and say "well we just won't check your ears then..." Didn't attempt to give him treats or try soothing him down. No reinforcements or therapeutic behavior.
Maybe it's just a bad Monday morning crew, but I wouldn't take any chances. Will not be going back.
Your dog deserves better.